JavaOne 2007: Some cool things to investigate as soon as possible

The first day of JavaOne is continuing. It seems to reach out in many different directions, from SOA to Groovy, from mobile devies to JEE Application Servers. It is a challenge to keep track of what’s being told.

I was just in a general session on technical advances, with many contribution from various people from Sun as well as one from NASA. And some very interesting projects were discussed. I would suggest that if you can spare the time, you may want to take a look.

The jMaki and Phobos projects: jMaki provides a wrapper on top of many existing AJAX frameworks such as Dojo, Spry, scriptaculous, Yahoo; it can be used at the JSP tag level as well as with JSF components. See: http://javaserver.org/jmaki/ . Phobos backend, server side scriptingPhobos communicates with backend Java "services" and turns into JavaScript data (JSON based)(see https://phobos.dev.java.net/)

JavaFX Script – Language designed to support content creation. Leverage the richness of Java2D with easy scripting, supported on various platforms such as mobile devices as well the desktop (and webstart). Available for download right now (the first two hours after the announcement saw 2000 downloads).

IRIS – A Flickr Photo browser – that illustrates some interesting interaction between HTML, JavaScript, CSS on the one hand and a Jkava Applet on the other (see http://swinglabs.org/iris and http://iris.dev.java.net.)

NASA World Wind – a Google Earth lookalike, completely Java based (desktop application, runnable through java web start): a geospatial browser with incredible graphics. Open to everyone. World Wind lets you zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth. Leveraging Landsat satellite imagery and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data, World Wind lets you experience Earth terrain in visually rich 3D, just as if you were really there. Virtually visit any place in the world. Look across the Andes, into the Grand Canyon, over the Alps, or along the African Sahara.See: http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov